Slowly Down the Ganges

Slowly Down the Ganges
Author: Eric Newby
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2013-02-21
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0007508212

‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ is seen as a vintage Newby masterpiece, alongside ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ and ‘Love and War in the Apennines’. Told with Newby's self-deprecating humour and wry attention to detail, this is a classic of the genre and a window into an enchanting piece of history.

A Long Walk in the Himalaya

A Long Walk in the Himalaya
Author: Garry Weare
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0975022873

Garry Weare is enigmatic, funny and he has an enormous conscience. He brings into the story of his Himalayan traverse a succession of vignettes about people's lives that he meets along the way, relevant history, natural history observations and a delightful sprinkling of his inimitable sense of humour. The warmth of his relationships with his old Kashmiri friends and various people from the trekking fraternity adds a wonderful dimension to this journeyman's tale'. Peter Hillary Weare's finely rendered story of his five-month trek from the sacred source of the Ganges through the Kullu Valley, Zanskar and Ladakh to his houseboat in Kashmir is remarkably entertaining. The people he meets and travels with are fully-fledged characters that the reader comes to know and care about while the Himalaya, captured in all their variety, cast their spell. It is as if the act of walking allows the author to fully understand all the nuances - spiritual, environmental, social and political - of this inspiring region. 'A Long Walk in the Himalaya' is a book to savour, a book that the reader will return to again and again. English-born Garry Weare has had a long-standing relationship with the Himalaya. In 1970 he first went to Kashmir to teach. It changed his life and he went on to live on a houseboat in Kashmir, to pioneer many classic treks and to research the 'Trekking in the Indian Himalaya' guidebook published by Lonely Planet, now in its 4th edition. Weare is a life member of the Himalayan Club, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a noted mountain photographer and a founding director of the Australian Himalayan Foundation. He has one daughter, two stepdaughters and lives with his wife Margie Thomas in the Southern Highlands, NSW.

The Ganges

The Ganges
Author: Raghubir Singh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2003
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780500284100

Photographs and text capture the many moods and essence of the Ganges River.

Ganges

Ganges
Author: Sudipta Sen
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 030011916X

A sweeping, interdisciplinary history of the world's third-largest river, a potent symbol across South Asia and the Hindu diaspora Originating in the Himalayas and flowing into the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is India's most important and sacred river. In this unprecedented work, historian Sudipta Sen tells the story of the Ganges, from the communities that arose on its banks to the merchants that navigated its waters, and the way it came to occupy center stage in the history and culture of the subcontinent. Sen begins his chronicle in prehistoric India, tracing the river's first settlers, its myths of origin in the Hindu tradition, and its significance during the ascendancy of popular Buddhism. In the following centuries, Indian empires, Central Asian regimes, European merchants, the British Empire, and the Indian nation-state all shaped the identity and ecology of the river. Weaving together geography, environmental politics, and religious history, Sen offers in this lavishly illustrated volume a remarkable portrait of one of the world's largest and most densely populated river basins.

The Shadow That Seeks the Sun

The Shadow That Seeks the Sun
Author: Ray Brooks
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1786781387

An uplifting story of enlightenment that reveals simple yet profound truths about our true nature, set amidst the atmospheric banks of the River Ganges that will appeal to both the self-help, non-duality, and "Eat, Pray, Love" travel markets. "No effort is necessary, Ray, no new knowledge required or acquired. No transcendental experience or higher consciousness needs to be achieved. When the recognition of what you are is seen - nothing at all happens. Why would it? You simply find yourself as you already are." It is widely thought that finding peace, happiness and freedom requires tremendous effort - that in order to achieve a state of contentment and harmony in life, a journey must be taken, or someone or something must be awakened or overcome. After a chance encounter with an Anglo-Indian holy man on the ghats of the sacred River Ganges, Ray Brooks discovers through the course of nine conversations that his quest for wholeness has been futile: no such journey was necessary, and, just like a shadow that seeks the sun, he had been searching for a self that had never been lost in the first place. After acknowledging that simple yet profound truth - that the seeker and that which is sought are one in the same - the search for "oneness" is complete. This book offers no systems of belief or promises. Instead, it clearly points to that which is ever-present yet completely overlooked: the ordinariness and beauty of our true nature.

River of Gods

River of Gods
Author: Ian McDonald
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 658
Release: 2009-09-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1591028116

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business — a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj — the waif, the mind-reader, the prophet — when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden. In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures — one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.

Homeless Bird

Homeless Bird
Author: Gloria Whelan
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2009-10-06
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0061975826

The National Book Award-winning novel about one remarkable young woman who dares to defy fate, perfect for readers who enjoyed A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park or Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. Like many girls her age in India, thirteen-year-old Koly faces her arranged marriage with hope and courage. But Koly's story takes a terrible turn when in the wake of the ceremony, she discovers she's been horribly misled—her life has been sold for a dowry. Can she forge her own future, even in the face of time-worn tradition? Perfect for schools and classrooms, this universally acclaimed, bestselling, and award-winning novel by master of historical fiction Gloria Whelan is a gripping tale of hope that will transport readers of all ages.

Banaras

Banaras
Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2013-06-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0307832953

The sacred city of Banāras on the River Ganges is one of the oldest living cities in the world—as old as Jerusalem, Athens, and Peking. It is the place where Shiva, the Lord of All, is said to have made his permanent home since the dawn of creation. There are few cities in India as traditionally Hindu and as symbolic of the whole of Hindu culture as Banāras. In this eloquent, finely observed study, Diana Eck shows how the city over the centuries has become a lens through which the Hindu vision of the world is precisely focused. She reveals the spiritual and historical resonance of this holy place where great sages such as the Buddha and Shankara were taught, where ashrams, palaces, and universities were built, where God has been imagined and imagined in a thousand ways. She describes the rites of its temples, the busy life of its riverfront, and the exuberance of its festivals. She tells how people travel from all over India to Banāras for the privilege of dying a good death here, for they believe that on the banks of the River Ganges where “the atmosphere of devotion is improbable in its strength,” it is possible to be released from the earthly round forever. In her account of the sacred history, geography, and art of the city, its elaborate and thriving rituals, its myths and literature, and its importance to pilgrims and seekers, Diana Eck uses her wealth of scholarship to make the Hindu tradition come powerfully alive so that we come to understand the meaning of this sacred city to the millions of believers who have been coming here for over 2,500 years.

The Twice-born

The Twice-born
Author: Aatish Taseer
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9353023890

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.The Twice-born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant book: it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterised by the music of Aatish Taseer's prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.